COM0015 – Blog 1: Good Old Facebook

My two favourite listening and monitoring tools are Facebook Insights and Feedly. I like Insights because it provides me with new and constant information about the activities of our target audiences, or at least the ones who are using Facebook, including what devices they are using to access out Facebook page, where they are located, age, sex, when they are accessing our page, etc. This is valuable because it allows us to know who we are reaching, but more importantly, we know who we are not reaching and that’s where we develop future plans. For example, we know youth are not accessing our site, although they are on Facebook, so we are designing initiatives to bring youth over. As we move more into using other social media sites, this may change, but for now, given the overwhelming popularity of Facebook over all other social media platforms in Nunavut, it makes most sense to use Facebook Insights. I like Feedly because it allows me to easily monitor all of my keyword searches for a variety of different organizations and issues in one place. I prefer these tools over others because they are simple and very easy to use. They provide me with exactly what I need. Why over-complicate it if I don’t need to?

The two sources of news updates that I prefer are Facebook and Twitter. Most news and politics concerning Nunavut are discussed on Facebook and Twitter: traditional media organizations and journalists heavily engage with these two social media platforms. More and more, journalists and communications professionals are live Tweeting events or going live on Facebook. Often, I’ll see an issue mentioned or a link to a news article on Facebook or Twitter and then I’ll do further research on it using Google. Again, while it may sound repetitive or lazy, these two sites provide me with the most accurate news updates about issues that are important to my work.